Snapchat Hired Away One Of Google's Top Cloud Engineers

Snapchat,
the startup infamous for turning down massive acquisition offers
from Facebook and Google, just announced that it has hired one of
Google's top cloud engineers as part of a new push to bolster the
fledgling company's technology talent.

This won't be the only major engineering hire we hear about from
Snapchat in the coming months. The company currently has just 15
engineers on staff, but plans to add as many as 50 this year,
co-founder Bobby Murphy told the WSJ.

In his piece, MacMillan wrote that Magnusson will be
"building technology infrastructure in-house so that the
company can begin to lessen its reliance on partners like
Google." Apparently, that wasn't quite right,
as Magnusson quickly wrote up
a clarification on his Google+ page (emphasis
ours):

Ok for the record, the quote "Part of his new job at
Snapchat will be building technology infrastructure in-house so
that the company can begin to lessen its reliance on partners
like Google, Murphy said." is (a) not what Bobby said,
(b) not really a focus of my job either. Thx WSJ
for pissing off all my old Google friends. A more correct
statement is that we'll continuously evaluate
alternatives, and likely over time develop more infrastructure
ourselves, in particular in specialized areas of our
apps. Google is a great partner, and the success of
Snapchat would simply not have been possible without Google
Cloud, and we expect to work closely together.
Period.